Best way to preview kerning?

I was loading my font into TextEdit (mac) and printing it. It's an OpenType font BTW, and TextEdit does recognize OpenType kerning. I started noticing a weird thing. If I was evaluating the amount of space between the letters C and a, or between o and f or whatever, they would change from place to place! How can I know which one is really an accurate representation when the letters are shifting slightly from left to right. Like if the word Cat is in the first paragraph, and I see that the C is too far from the a, Cat might also be in the second paragraph, and there it looks just fine, and it's the same pair of letters! Anyone else had this problem?

Then I printed my font from Illustrator CS4 (a few paragraphs) and it did the same thing, as if individual letters were shifting around while it printed! So I rasterized the typing I had done in Illustrator and printed it and that fixed this problem. Is that what all you other guys do too? Any other ideas?

Also, I've noticed that I need to print the font at large sizes to see an accurate representation of it. It's a bold font, and if I make it smaller than say 20 points, it really gives a poor representation of it, even when I print it in just 30 percent gray (not solid black) to avoid bleeding of the ink on the deskjet printer I use to cause distortion. I'm sure I should probably use a laserjet printer, but I can't afford one right now, and this is a new, nice deskjet printer. This actually makes since to me. I'm a graphic designer and so many times I have used a font that I like on screen and when I print it on a deskjet it looks awful!